ДВА ГОДА ДВИЖЕНИЯ

"With this action, we want to demonstrate the attitude of the young Communist electorate toward those in power," said Ilya Ponomaryov, the party's chief information officer.

The cruise on Sunday night, acting out the historic shot in October 1917 signaling the storming of the Winter Palace, was part of a broader Communist campaign orchestrated by Ponomaryov to attract and motivate younger voters.

"Many young people live without any money and lack hope for the future. This event is intended to demonstrate to them that it is still possible to fight to change things," said Ponomaryov, 28, who worked for the Yukos oil major from 1998 to 2002 before going to work for the Communist Party, or KPRF, in January of this year.

The three-hour cruise on the Moscow River followed a meeting of regional Komsomol leaders held earlier Sunday.

"We discussed how to organize KPRF campaigning in the regions so as to attract as many young people as we can," said Yury Afonin, first secretary of the KPRF council in Tula, who was appointed first secretary of the central committee of the Komsomol Union on Sunday.

Afonin said it was his success in bringing in 1,500 new Komsomol members in Tula that persuaded party leader Gennady Zyuganov and his deputy Ivan Melnikov to give him the post.

The first thing he did in Tula was to establish good relations with the local media, he said. "We often organize meetings with local journalists, and our local television channel covers us more than it does United Russia." On the national channels, the pro-Kremlin party gets the widest coverage.

It no doubt has helped the Communists' cause that Tula is part of the red belt and its governor, Vasily Starodubtsev, is a member of the party's central committee.

Vasily Koltashov, 24, first secretary of the Novosibirsk Komsomol organization, said the best way to attract the attention of the young is to organize "theatrical performances" like the symbolic shots from the Aurora.

Last January, for example, Koltashov said he organized a performance aimed at showing the evils of capitalism.

"To explain to people of my age that capitalism is bad, we put a tangerine-filled corpse of a bourgeois in a coffin. We pretended to be sorry for the death of a 'homo economicus,' but then we opened his body and distributed the tangerines among the people," he said.

The tangerines represented the property the dead man had accumulated.